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ReadWriteWeb recently has been talking up the new role of community managers in companies, especially start-ups, here lately.   See their posts “Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?” and “Community Manager Jobs Are Hot”.

The term community manager has traditionally had this definition, but that’s not what I’m talking about.   Well, hopefully, we don’t have any Ralph Furleys amongst us (Don Knotts was cool though!).  

Anyway, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has boiled the definition down to the following:

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

I certainly think this is a great start, but I think it basically captures one side of the job, the part that everyone sees, and the part the person in the role projects, but doesn’t address the actual ongoing intricacy of making a job like this work to success.

The other side of the job is the shaping of the process of discussion itself.   This involves both a grasp of discussion dynamics as well as social media technologies/trends (where being a person with web programming knowledge is very helpful).

Discussion dynamics is normally comprised of the implementation and enforcement of rules or guidelines in a community (covered very well in the book Managing Online Forums), along with the ongoing intervention to ensure that discussion has the greatest shot of producing more light than heat.   In other words, a community manager must work to engender the highest productivity of discussion, even in environments where the discussion is open and somewhat akin to free speech.   That is much more a challenge than appears on the surface, and something I very much believe people who have not managed a community fully realize.

As an aside, I believe managers of many-to-many discussion communities such as discussion boards (where virtually anyone can post topics) get this much more than bloggers, who are kind of like broadcasters seeking reactions to their oftentimes narrow points-of-view (myself not excluded, so don’t pout, bloggers!).   A blog cannot by definition be a community, because not everyone gets a shot at the podium if they so choose.   A real community is like a neighborhood meeting, where anyone in the crowd can stand up and voice their concerns, and not necessarily just in response to one speaker or leader.

Following social media technologies/trends and adopting what makes the community discussion the most productive, while connecting it web-like to many other pertinent communities and people (especially the most well-regarded message/meme spreaders) is the second half of this half of the community manager’s role of shaping the process of discussion (whew!).   I could write many posts that delve much more deeply into this (and I will, ultimately), but let’s suffice it to say that a community manager must have a grasp of the mechanisms they currently employ as well as what they perceive they need to employ.

Community managers need to understand the technical problems their community members bring to the fore, as well as the ones they don’t bring up at all.   Oftentimes, community members will run into brick walls that cannot be appropriately solved by management techniques that work well over the long term.   And they won’t have the clues that the community manager should have to recognize them as needing technical solutions and deal with them accordingly.

One simple example of such a brick wall is when a discussion board has many discussions where the perceived quality of the discussion by many participants and would-be participants is low, and the discussion board has no mechanism for helping its members filter out the lowest quality posts.   Most members might not even think to ask for a “filter”, which might be an alien concept to many members, depending upon the community (which could be a group of people not very well-versed in computer lingo and processes).   However, the administrator must be adept enough to spot such a concern over quality, and do the work to figure out the most community-palatable technical approach for members to conduct this filtering, without perhaps even realizing they are filtering.  

The community manager in this situation and in general needs to know how to seek out and evaluate the technological approaches that will satisfy the ongoing perceived technical needs of the community over time.   And as I stated before, if they actually know how to implement such approaches, so much the better.   Being intimately involved in the technical solutioning (as it were) to community infrastructural issues, I think, leads to better results.   When a community manager is even doing some of the involved web programming, the feedback-to-changes iterations can run much more quickly and thus, the community members satisfied as fast.

The bottom line is we should never sell short the intricacy of the actual day-to-day work of community management.   These are indeed positions that deserve salaries and the full attention of the individual hired for this purpose.   Productive community management is full-time work, and a half!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Online Communities & Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.